Vicki Umipeg’s near-death experience

Step 1

Around 1950 · At birth · Told by Vicki and the study

Vicki is born very premature and goes blind in the incubator

Vicki was born very premature, at 22 weeks of pregnancy. She weighed less than 1.5 kilograms. The doctors put her in an incubator and gave her oxygen. The incubator was a new invention at the time.

They gave her too much oxygen. The oxygen damaged the nerves of her eyes, and she went completely blind. According to the researchers who studied her case, the same thing happened to about 50,000 babies in the United States in those years.

Many years later, a researcher asked her whether she had ever seen anything. This was her answer:

“Nothing, never. No light, no shadows, no nothing, ever. […] I’ve never been able to understand even the concept of light.”

Vicki knew the world through hearing and touch. She had never had a single image, awake or in her dreams.

Step 2

February 12, 1963 · Seriously ill with appendicitis · Vicki’s account

Vicki says that at 12 she had a first experience, and that she saw

At 12, Vicki had appendicitis that turned into peritonitis. Peritonitis is a serious infection of the abdomen. She says she had a near-death experience, and that during it she saw for the first time.

Greg Wilson is a researcher with a Seattle group that studies NDEs. Wilson asked her what it felt like to be able to see. She answered that she was amazed. She thought, “So that’s what it’s like!” And then she thought it was even better than she had imagined.

But at first it was hard. She says it was “like hearing words and not being able to understand them, but knowing that they were words.” Seeing frightened her, because she didn’t understand what was happening to her.

During that experience she also saw her whole life pass before her. Ten years later she had a second experience, very similar to the first. She says the second one was the clearer of the two. That is the one we tell here.

Step 3

The night of February 2, 1973 · In Seattle · Told by Vicki and the study

Vicki gets into a van with two customers who had been drinking, and they crash

In 1973, Vicki was 22. She sometimes sang at a nightclub in Seattle. One night, at closing time, she couldn’t get a taxi home.

She accepted a ride from two of the club’s customers. Both of them had been drinking. The van had a very serious accident, and she was thrown out of it.

• She fractured her skull and had a concussion.
• She was injured in the neck, the back, and one leg.
• It took her a whole year before she could stand without risk of fainting.

She remembers very little of the accident scene. By her account, she was out of her body and then back in it, again and again. There, she only remembers seeing the wrecked van for a moment.

An ambulance took her to Harborview Hospital in Seattle. She doesn’t remember the ride.

Step 7

Exact time unknown · Vicki’s account

Vicki says she reached a meadow full of light where her grandmother and two friends were waiting

She went headfirst into a dark tube. At the far end there was light. The music turned into hymns, and she rolled out onto a grassy meadow.

All around there were trees, flowers, and a great many people. She says there was so much light that you could feel it, not just see it. This is how she described it:

“Everybody there was made of light. And I was made of light. What the light conveyed was love.”

Five people who had died before her were waiting there. Debby and Diane were two blind classmates who had died as children. In life they were blind and had a severe intellectual disability. There they were healthy and full of life. Mr. and Mrs. Zilk, who had looked after her when she was little, were there too. And so was her grandmother. Her grandmother had raised her and had died two years earlier. She was reaching out her arms to hug her.

No one said a word. She says she only felt love, and that they were welcoming her.

Step 8

Exact time unknown · Vicki’s account

Vicki says a figure told her she had to go back, and that she saw her life pass before her

Suddenly she felt she knew everything. She understood things about mathematics and science that she had never studied.

A figure with much more light than the others appeared beside her. She recognized it as Jesus, because she had already seen him in her first experience. The figure told her, without words, that it wasn’t her time yet and that she had to go back.

She didn’t want to go back. The figure told her she had to go back to learn and to teach how to love and forgive, and to have her children. She had no children then, and she wanted them with all her heart. So she agreed. After that she had three children.

Before leaving, she saw her whole life, from the day she was born. One of the memories was from the school for the blind, when she was 8. She saw the dining room from a distance, without touching anything. She saw the metal chairs, the round tables, and the plastic tablecloths. She says that at school she only knew those things were there when she bumped into them or touched them.

At the end she felt a jolt, like a roller coaster going backward. She was back in her body. Her body felt heavy and hurt.

Step 9

1993 to 1995 · Twenty years later · Told by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper

Twenty years later, Vicki tells her story to two researchers

In the mid-1990s, the psychologist Kenneth Ring and his assistant Sharon Cooper were looking for blind people who had had an NDE. Vicki was their best-known case. Greg Wilson gave them the tapes of his interview with her. Later, Ring and Cooper interviewed her again in 1994 and 1995.

Ring and Cooper asked her about her dreams. She said that in her dreams she eats, plays the piano, sings, touches things, and smells them. She put it this way: “No color, no sight of any sort, no shadows, no light.” She says her NDE was nothing like that.

Ring asked her whether it had been seeing or knowing. She answered: “It’s both, Ken, it’s both seeing and knowing.”

Ring noted that blind people use words about seeing a lot. She says, for example, that she likes to “watch” television.

Ring and Cooper looked for someone who could confirm what she saw in the emergency room. More than twenty years had passed, and she didn’t know who had treated her. Ring and Cooper wrote that it was “impossible” to confirm anything.

So what can be checked today of what she described?